Finally, Lemmy appears to be run by developers who appear to be interested in their own issues and regularly appear to dismiss issues raised by users. This is not sustainable.

I would love to fix all the issues that users report, but for that we would need about ten times as many developers. The way it is we simply don’t have enough time to work on everything, and need to prioritize things.

Its okay, everyone is wrong about some things.

Those are pretty common opinions. It’s sad that some people cannot accept them.

They refuse to upgrade and then complain that mod tools are insufficient (which have improved a lot in the meantime). You really can’t make this up.

Having another volunteer also means more work for us, as we need to communicate with this person regularly. It also means that we maintainers get more removed from the users, and wont be able to talk with them directly anymore. And in my experience, volunteers are very motivated in the beginning, but most of them get bored or busy after a while and then you need to find someone new again. Not really worth the hassle in this case.

Also the database issues mentioned in this thread may simply be from lack of ram.

Its easy to say this now, more than half a year later. But youre ignoring that we were completely overworked and exhausted back then. That said Im taking your feedback into account and will hopefuly to handle it better in the future.

Sure but its not so easy to find volunteers. Would you or db0 be willing to do this?

How else would you say this? And who do you suggest reaching out to? Keep in mind that it would have to be a volunteer position as we dont have the funds to pay for it.

I’m surprised that there are still instances out there running 0.18.2-rc2 or 0.17.0. Those versions are full of bugs and miss so many features.

Federation doesnt have many breaking changes anymore. The bigger problem is if a database migration goes wrong, then there should be an admin around to fix it manually. Im sure Wordpress has the resources for much more thorough testing so these things dont happen.

Last year before the Reddit migration I worked a fulltime job for a few months, and the salary was around 8k€ per month.

I looked at some of the pull requests and most of them seem very small, only changing a couple of lines. Still impressive but not really comparable to implementing a new feature in Lemmy. For that we need to make changes to various different parts of the code (database, federation, api, js library, frontend), then test it and pass code review. All that takes a lot of work because we need to ensure that existing functionality doesnt break. In this way a web server like Lemmy has much higher standards because there should be no bugs at all. If your AI project has some bugs, users can easily roll back their local install to an earlier version.

Youre right about lemmy-ui, unfortunately it doesnt have enough contributors. I dont know why that is, you’d think a project written in a popular language like Typescript would easily find contributors.

The entire time after the Reddit migration was extremely chaotic. I dont remember when exactly the CSAM attacks happened, but around that time we were already very exhausted from all the urgent work we had to do on scaling, patching security vulnerabilities and fixing countless bugs. I also dont remember receiving any requests from admins to help out with this. So if you notice something similar in the future, feel free to message me directly. Anyway we are only two people working full-time on Lemmy, and have lots of different tasks to take care of. So it gets very difficult to give everything the attention it deserves, and to prioritize things correctly.

@haui@lemmy.giftedmc.com if this is true then you should try adding some swap space.

Exactly

I suppose there is still room for database optimization then, but its hard to find people who know how to do this.

But yeah, the moderation tools have to be the worst. Lemmy has an amazing development group that’s separate from the main developers who have patched together a good set of tools, from automods to CSAM and illegal scanning, huge props to them - but these issues are routinely ignored by the main devs. I was shocked, honestly shocked that when we were under CSAM attacks that there was not an immediate roundtable of the head devs to try to solve the problem officially. Here was a problem that 99% of countries would immediately and gladly throw us, the instance admins, in jail over and they just handwaved it away. In fact, I don’t know that there was ever an official post about it, or even that there are things coming to help with it.

My impression at the time was that admins were handling the CSAM wave just fine with existing mod tools and through Matrix chats. A roundtable wouldnt have solved anything except make people feel good. Besides we still were extremely busy at the time to scale up Lemmy and resolve problems revealed by the huge amount of new users. Keep in mind that Lemmy is still at version 0.x which means that its not feature complete. So if something is missing that you find important, consider waiting a year or two and checking back then. Or get it implemented yourself, thats what open source is all about.

That said most of the features you mentioned have already been implemented, including a list of all locally uploaded images.

Not just that its boring, mod tools also require a huge amount of work because you need to make changes across all parts of the code (database, api, federation and frontend).

There is documentation, if anything is missing we definitely appreciate contributions.

https://join-lemmy.org/docs/administration/administration.html

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-docs

It would be interesting to investigate why Lemmy has high CPU usage. In principle it should be quite efficient as its written in Rust. Its also not doing anything particularly performance intensive, unless you are subscribed to lots of communities or have lots of users.